4 ms·

I think the entire scaling thing is a bit like "manual memory management vs GC", both have advantages and disadvantages.

bastawhiz 4y ago
Yes and no. Different types of memory management essentially accomplish the same thing. The way you build for them and their performance characteristics vary. In that way, scaling is the same. But scaling is different in that you're physical ability to scale up with on-prem is bounded by physically procuring/installing/running servers, whereas in the cloud that's already been done by someone else weeks or months ago. When you shut off on-prem hardware, you don't get a refund on the capex cost (you're only saving on power/cooling, maybe some wear and tear). It's not just that you need to plan differently, it's that you need to design your systems to be less elastic. You have fixed finite resources that you cannot exceed, which means even if you have money to throw at a problem, it doesn't matter: you cannot buy your way out of a scaling problem in the short-medium term. If you run out of disk space, you're out of disk space. If you run out of servers with enough RAM for caching, you're evicting data from your cache. The systems you build need to work predictably weeks or months out, and that is a fundamentally different way of building large systems.
- lastangryman 4y ago
  This is it, and what so many anti-cloud people are missing. For start ups, how can you possibly take a gamble on trying to predict what your traffic is going to be and paying upfront for dedicated servers. It puts you in a loose-loose situation - your product is not the right fit, you've got a dedicated server you are not using. Your product is a success - well now you need to go and order another server, better hope you can get it spun up in time before everything falls over. I worked at a startup where we saw 1000x increase in load in a day due to a customer's app going viral. On prem would have killed us, cloud saved us. And you are bang on about managed services. RDS is expensive no doubt, but having your 4 person dev team burn through your seed round messing around with database back ups and failover is a far higher cost. Of course some companies grow out of the cloud, they have full time ops engineers and can predict traffic ahead of time - for sure, go back to on prem. But for people to hold up articles like this and say "I always said cloud was pointless!" is just absurd.
  - chillfox 4y ago
    OK, if you don't want to get good at planning as a company, that's fine. It's OK, just please don't pretend that it's impossible. I worked at a startup that did the crazy scaling with physical servers just fine. No problem. The marketing department knew ahead of time when something was likely to go viral, IT/Dev knew how much capacity was needed per user and procurement knew lead time on hardware + could keep the vendors in the loop so that hardware would be ready on short notice. With good internal communication it really is possible to be good at capacity management and get hardware on short notice if required. Normally we would have servers racked and ready about 2 weeks after ordering, but it could be done in under half a day if required. Edit: (we had our own datacentre and the suppliers were in a different state)
    - lastangryman 4y ago
      > The marketing department knew ahead of time when something was likely to go viral That's fine when it's your product. The situation I'm talking about was a SaaS product providing backend services for customers app. Our customers didn't know if their app was going to go viral, there is no way we could have known. I maintain on-prem would have been totally inappropriate in this situation. Also, "the marketing department knew ahead of time when something was likely to go viral"...that is quite a statement. They must have beeen some marketing department.
      - chillfox 4y ago
        Eh... I used to think they were just a normal marketing department. I have since learned that they were good and most places have bad ones.

bastawhiz 4y ago

Yes and no. Different types of memory management essentially accomplish the same thing. The way you build for them and their performance characteristics vary. In that way, scaling is the same. But scaling is different in that you're physical ability to scale up with on-prem is bounded by physically procuring/installing/running servers, whereas in the cloud that's already been done by someone else weeks or months ago. When you shut off on-prem hardware, you don't get a refund on the capex cost (you're only saving on power/cooling, maybe some wear and tear). It's not just that you need to plan differently, it's that you need to design your systems to be less elastic. You have fixed finite resources that you cannot exceed, which means even if you have money to throw at a problem, it doesn't matter: you cannot buy your way out of a scaling problem in the short-medium term. If you run out of disk space, you're out of disk space. If you run out of servers with enough RAM for caching, you're evicting data from your cache. The systems you build need to work predictably weeks or months out, and that is a fundamentally different way of building large systems.

lastangryman 4y ago
This is it, and what so many anti-cloud people are missing. For start ups, how can you possibly take a gamble on trying to predict what your traffic is going to be and paying upfront for dedicated servers. It puts you in a loose-loose situation - your product is not the right fit, you've got a dedicated server you are not using. Your product is a success - well now you need to go and order another server, better hope you can get it spun up in time before everything falls over. I worked at a startup where we saw 1000x increase in load in a day due to a customer's app going viral. On prem would have killed us, cloud saved us. And you are bang on about managed services. RDS is expensive no doubt, but having your 4 person dev team burn through your seed round messing around with database back ups and failover is a far higher cost. Of course some companies grow out of the cloud, they have full time ops engineers and can predict traffic ahead of time - for sure, go back to on prem. But for people to hold up articles like this and say "I always said cloud was pointless!" is just absurd.
- chillfox 4y ago
  OK, if you don't want to get good at planning as a company, that's fine. It's OK, just please don't pretend that it's impossible. I worked at a startup that did the crazy scaling with physical servers just fine. No problem. The marketing department knew ahead of time when something was likely to go viral, IT/Dev knew how much capacity was needed per user and procurement knew lead time on hardware + could keep the vendors in the loop so that hardware would be ready on short notice. With good internal communication it really is possible to be good at capacity management and get hardware on short notice if required. Normally we would have servers racked and ready about 2 weeks after ordering, but it could be done in under half a day if required. Edit: (we had our own datacentre and the suppliers were in a different state)
  - lastangryman 4y ago
    > The marketing department knew ahead of time when something was likely to go viral That's fine when it's your product. The situation I'm talking about was a SaaS product providing backend services for customers app. Our customers didn't know if their app was going to go viral, there is no way we could have known. I maintain on-prem would have been totally inappropriate in this situation. Also, "the marketing department knew ahead of time when something was likely to go viral"...that is quite a statement. They must have beeen some marketing department.
    - chillfox 4y ago
      Eh... I used to think they were just a normal marketing department. I have since learned that they were good and most places have bad ones.